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Keep gently moving – although you may feel tired after a long day on the mountain sitting still all evening can allow you to stiffen up and your tired muscles to get tight. Doing some basic stretches a few times throughout the evening and getting up regularly to move about can help prevent this.

Drink plenty of water – staying hydrated when out skiing and throughout the evening is a simple way to greatly aid recovery. Staying hydrated allows the body to flush away any toxins that build up from the exercise throughout the day. Dehydration is easy at altitude and can have some nasty side effects. Make sure you carry some water with you or stop on the mountain to rehydrate (coffee and beer/hot wine do not count!).

Eat well – keeping well fuelled is essential when exercising for prolonged periods. Getting in a decent dose of nutrients at dinner will help your energy systems recover and prepare you for another day of being active. Choose a variety of nutrient dense foods throughout the evening to ensure you cover all your bases. Whilst on ski holiday is not the time to restrict your food intake or to simply forget to eat because you were having too much fun.

Use the sauna – many accommodation facilities will have access to a sauna or something similar. If you are able to it is a great way unwind and recover. It is even the perfect place to do some gentle stretches whilst you’re nice and warm.

Cold shower on legs/feet – using cold therapy to aid recovery is an age old trick. Even a simple few inches of cold water in the bottom of a bath to bathe your feet for 10 minutes will help them recover. An alternative is to hold a cold shower over your calves and thig

hs for a few minutes at the end of your evening shower.

Have a massage / foam roller – if the holiday budget allows then a massage is a great way to relieve any aches and pains and to reduce post exercise stiffness.

Warm up before you get kitted up – the next morning it can be very beneficial to spend a few minutes getting warm and limbered up before getting your kit on. This will allow you to ease off any aches and pains from the day before and to check that you have good range of movement throughout your body. A brief warm up can make you aware of any sore spots or stiffness. Being aware of how your body is feeling will allow you to better plan what you are feeling up to that day and minimise any nasty surprises through the day.

A winter sports holiday for many is a unique type of holiday, occuring for one or possibly two weeks a year if you’re lucky. While passionate skiers like to use this opportunity to get as much time on the slopes as possible, winter sport holidays can involve some long days, pushing the body to complete movements unlike anything else we tend to do in normal daily life. This exposure to sudden unaccustomed activity, especially for us unseasoned skiers and snowboarders, is a recipe for injury.

This is where targeted Sports Conditioning exercises come into play! Putting the effort in during the weeks prior to your holiday is the perfect way to reduce the risk of injuries on holiday and help you get the most out of your time away.

If you are like many weekend warriors and you spend the majority of your week sat at a desk, then behind a steering wheel and finally at the dinner table and onto the sofa, a great place to start is by increasing the amount of time throughout the day that you spend on your feet. Even if this means standing to take phone calls, when chatting to colleagues, or going for a walk every lunch time. It will pay off when you need your feet to spend a whole day in ski boots.

In addition to these small daily changes, a tailormade exercise routine including exercises such as squats, wall sits and side lunges in the weeks prior to your trip will allow you to gradually increase exposure to prolonged periods of exercise and give your ski specific muscles time to strengthen. It takes at least 6-8 weeks of structured loading to increase the strength of your muscles so it is essential to get started in good time before you leave (that said, it is never too late to get started!).

Once the basics are mastered, you can then gradually increase the amount of weight you hold when doing these exercises to make sure you continue to push your limits and strengthen to the max. Another thing to include in ski prep is balance work. Staying upright on skis and the constant shifting from one leg to the other requires some finely tuned balance skills. Including some balance work in your ski prep could be as simple as gradually increasing the amount of time you can balance on one leg. This can even be done throughout your work day to help increase the amount of time up on your feet – try lasting a whole phone call stood on one leg. Or you could get fancy and use equipment such as a BOSU ball or wobble cushion to add an extra ski specific challenge to the above strengthening exercises.

Enhancing your training to push yourself further, keep you motivated and physically challenged is a key part of your ski fitness. Our Ski Fit Package provides advice on which exercises to complete, not only saving you time but also ensuring you head to the slopes in the best possible position. While standard strenght exercises form a good base, the use of a Ski Fit programme will challenge you further, progressing your base line exercises and keeping you body engaged and strong.

Our Ski Fit package includes:
• 4 x individual Sports Conditioning sessions – perfect for keeping you accountable in the lead up to your holiday
• 2 x sports massage – to relieve any niggles or tightness before you get out on the slopes
• gym and home based workout plans tailored to you and the demands of skiing

Call 01454 540066 to book your space on our Ski Fit programme!

Pilates is a form of low-impact exercise that aims to strengthen core muscles while improving postural alignment and general flexibility. Pilates movements tend to target the core, although the exercises work other areas of your body as well. You can do Pilates with or without equipment. Some classes use large specialist Pilates equipment, but the majority will be a mat-work based class with small equipment such as Pilates balls and resistance bands to compliment or progress the exercises. Expect the moves to involve slow, precise movements and breath control.  Typically, classes tend to supply any equipment needed and you just need to turn up in the right place wearing clothes that are not going to restrict your movement. This makes it an easy type of exercise to take up with minimal upfront investment.

Your ‘core’ is a name given to the deep muscles that control the finer movements of your trunk. This includes your shoulder blades, rib cage, abdomen, spine, pelvis, and hips. The core muscles are typically broad, flat, deep muscles that are designed to work at a relatively low level for a prolonged period of time. This means in order to maximise your potential to train these muscles you need to do low level control exercises for a prolonged period of time – such as Pilates.

Done well, Pilates can teach somebody the finer details of how to perform efficient movement. They learn how to get from one position to another efficiently as opposed to just copying movements. It can also teach a variety of movement strategies, so somebody can know how to utilise a different movement pattern when they are doing something repetitive or fatiguing – this can help to reduce wear and tear of always moving in the same way. Another useful technique learnt in Pilates is to differentiate between movements that require your spine to be still and stable and movements that require your spine to bend. This skill is a key part of avoiding low back pain and injuries.

When learnt properly Pilates can be used as a way to be aware if you are moving efficiently and can then be applied in many other situations. This means the movements and techniques learnt in Pilates can be used to improve your posture and control in daily activities as well as improving your body awareness and technique when doing sports or manual jobs. The ability to move well and have good core control can greatly reduce the stress on some commonly injured parts of your body and decrease the rate of wear and tear.

DOMS stands for Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness, and it occurs as a result of exerting your muscles. When you do an activity that is new, or you are working harder or for longer than usual, the extra stress on the tissues of your body causes micro trauma. These are microscopic tears in the fibres and occur widespread throughout the muscle groups being used. This usually results in widespread soreness in one or multiple areas of your body 1-3 days after the activity, and the soreness can last quite a few days.

This is totally normal. As these tiny microscopic tears heal they create slightly stronger muscles. It is important that our muscles go through this process in order to allow us to adapt and change, so we get better able to withstand the stresses of a new task in the future. However, it is not possible to predict when DOMS will strike. Not everybody gets it and some people seem to suffer more than others.

As a general rule it is more likely when starting out doing exercise, when doing something new, or when working harder than normal. This means as you keep training it does get better, you won’t always feel like that after exercise. For some this is reassuring to know it is possible to exercise and not feel sore the next day, and for others a lack of DOMS means they are due an upgrade to their program and should be working harder!

Certain types of exercise are more likely to cause DOMS than others. Typically exercises with a high eccentric load are more likely to cause soreness. Eccentric is the lowering phase of a muscle (or the deceleration phase), for example when you bring the weight

back down towards your chest in a chest press.

This means that things like speed work, explosive/plyometric tasks, and repetitive high speed change of direction, all have a higher likelihood of causing soreness the next day. Clear examples of exercises with an eccentric focus would be jumping off of a box, or catching a heavy medicine ball. Generally exercises will always have an element of concentric and eccentric demands, with other muscles working isometrically to control the movement, but you can modify them to increase or decrease the bias accordingly. This knowledge can allow you to control the amount of soreness you are likely to have following exercise. This information is also useful if you do not like DOMS. Doing a graded program that starts with basic isometric and steady concentric exercises and builds up in intensity and speed of movements slowly is more suited to managing DOMS.

There have been lots of studies into what we can do to reduce the soreness that occurs after exercise. The majority of which have shown there is very little we can do to shorten the length of time the soreness lasts. But there are things that we can do to make sure it does not last longer than normal. These include basic things like keeping active and moving around lots despite the soreness, do not repeat a hard activity or workout that targets the same area until the soreness has calmed down, drink plenty of water and eat well, and use things that usually give you a feel good effect (such as a hot bath or some gentle stretches). Some people who are training hard and need to recover as quickly as possible could also look into using the Compex for improved recovery. You are able to hire a Compex unit from The Physio Clinic to try it out.

 

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It is possible to create too much DOMS. Sudden extreme exercise can cause Rhabdomyolysis. This is rare and unlikely but possible. It causes extreme levels of post exercise soreness, rigidity (loss of range of movement due to rigid muscles), lack of urine or urine that is very dark in colour, and this takes longer to recover from that just DOMS. It is due to excessive levels of microtrauma that results in high levels of creatine kinase in the blood and puts excessive stress on your kidneys.

Unlike DOMS, Rhabdomyolysis is a serious condition that requires medical attention. You need all the symptoms for it to be Rhabdomyolysis, if you are just excessively stiff and sore after exercise … you just have bad DOMS, plan better next time.